Is the dating app boom making it harder to build a real relationship?

We live in the era of online dating. Swipes, likes and matches on popular dating apps have already become habitual and even commonplace. More than 17% of all modern marriages start with dating on the internet, and this number is growing rapidly.

The real boom in web dating began in 2012 when the Tinder app launched. At that time the swipe mechanic was really something new. It turned the search for a soulmate into a sort of game that was engaging and truly unusual. Over subsequent years, interest in online dating only increased. Today, every third person on the planet has met someone online at least once during their life.

But does the popularity of web dating really increase your chance of dating success?

The advantages and disadvantages of current dating apps

In today’s world, where there’s sometimes no time left for personal life, web dating has become a real find for millions of people. After all, it offers many advantages:

• Convenience and accessibility. You can meet new people almost anytime and anywhere. And flexible settings for finding potential partners make it possible to significantly simplify your task.
• Variety and large selection. Modern dating services have millions of registered users, among whom there will be many people you’ll be interested in and enjoy meeting, and establishing a friendship or even a relationship.
• Saving time and resources. Dating apps reduce the time required to find potential partners, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and make it easy to weed out unsuitable candidates without spending a lot of time and energy on them.

For many people, these advantages are enough to use dating apps on a regular basis in their search for love. However, it is important to remember the disadvantages of this dating format:

• False information and deception. There’s no guarantee that the information in a person’s profile is accurate. Many people tend to greatly embellish their biographies, overly retouch their photos, or even create fake profiles that have nothing to do with reality.
• The lack of commitment in many users. Not all users of dating services are committed to serious and fruitful dating. Tinder is sometimes even referred to as a one-night stand dating app. Sometimes finding serious and interesting people here can be very problematic.
• Risk of disappointment. When you meet someone on a dating app or site, most of the communication takes place via text chat. But this format of communication doesn’t allow an objective evaluation of a person and sometimes leads to a biased assessment of them. You form an idealized image of the person you’re chatting with, which in reality does not exist. And then you get disappointed.

If you’re really committed to serious dating, want to avoid disappointment, and communicate with only interesting and promising dates, perhaps traditional web dating is not for you. Luckily, there are great alternatives to try out.

Live video chat: a dating format you’ll love

It’s clear that traditional dating apps aren’t going anywhere. They are still very popular, despite some very obvious disadvantages. But you definitely shouldn’t focus exclusively on them. If you want to expand your circle of acquaintances, find new friends or meet your true love on the web, we strongly recommend you investigate the online webcam chat format.

The number of popular chat roulettes today is measured in dozens, and less popular ones in hundreds. It’s very easy to get lost within this diversity. Therefore, we’d like to recommend several options worth your attention:

• LuckyCrush — a convenient, minimalist and modern chatroulette with a gender filter, a choice of communication language and good support service. According to the website, the service currently has over a million users in more than 100 countries.
• CooMeet — a popular alternative to Lucky crush that, like many similar video chats, offers users gender and language filters. But unlike many rivals, the gender filter on site works flawlessly and always connects men only with women. Plus, the users always verify their identity, so there are no fakes or bots. CooMeet also has user-friendly mobile apps for iOS and Android, a built-in message translator, and excellent customer support.
• Monkey — another pretty well-known online video platform, where you can not only meet and communicate with new people one-on-one, but also take advantage of several additional features. Here you can create an account, tell people a little about yourself, share photos and videos. In Monkey, you can chat one-on-one or in group videochat, if that’s relevant to you.
• FaceFlow — a web-service that supports one-on-one calls and group chats. There’s a convenient FaceFlow feature — the ability to forward a guest link to another user. By clicking on it, they will connect to your group chat and will be able to take part in the conversation. This is convenient if you like to chat with friends online.
• Tinychat — not quite a classic random chat. Tinychat focuses not on random one-on-one dating, but on video streaming. You can broadcast video to a large audience or watch streams from other users who interest you. There’s a separate section where broadcasts from users located near you are assembled.

These and other Luckycrush alternatives are very much worth considering. Although the basic principles are the same, many of the individual functions and additional capabilities are different. Therefore, if you’re considering video chat as a dating format, but don’t know what to choose, try several different options and independently evaluate all their advantages and disadvantages.

So, what’s better — dating apps or chatroulettes?

In fact, there is no clear answer to this question. These are completely different formats, each of which has obvious advantages and equally obvious disadvantages. It’s very unlikely that one format will ever supplant the other. They coexist quite successfully in the modern internet space and meet the needs of a multimillion-dollar audience. And the boom in online dating certainly doesn’t stop people from building real relationships.

Of course, both of the above dating formats are gradually developing, expanding functionality, and adding new features for their users. Indeed, they are beginning to borrow elements from each other — member profiles and search filters appear in chatroulette, and built-in video chat appears in dating applications. Perhaps these formats will one day merge into a single type of dating service, but this is still a very distant prospect.